The New Scientist editorializes:
The IPCC report, due out on 27 September, will provide communicators with plenty of factual ammunition. It will inevitably be attacked by climate deniers. In response, rebuttals, debunkings and counter-arguments will pour forth, as fighting denial has become a cottage industry in itself.
None of it will make any real difference. This is for the simple reason that the argument is not really about the science; it is about politics and values.
Consider, for example, the finding that people with politically conservative beliefs are more likely to doubt the reality or seriousness of climate change. Accurate information about climate change is no less readily available to these people than anybody else. But climate policies such as the regulation of industrial emissions often seem to clash with conservative political views. And people work backwards from their values, filtering the facts according to their pre-existing beliefs.
Astute and accurate. Fundamentally, I believe that laws are for those few rare times when freedom can’t work. Too many others seem to believe freedom is only for those few rare times when laws can’t work.
I have noticed that most of the people I know on the Left take the approach that if there MIGHT be a problem, pass a new law. If it turns out to not be a problem after all, that’s OK, no one that THEY cared anything about was harmed, so no harm, no foul.
Maybe conservatives (I’ll include libertarians too) are just smarter and can understand the issues (aren’t fooled by emotional appeals).
It’s amusing how politics and values are fine when warmists are shaming skeptics who “didn’t care about the planet or their children”, and wasting tax dollars to subsidize every unviable alternative energy boondoggle.
Right. And the “values” are, of course, imaginary.
A friend of mine sent his three daughters to a private school that sells “values”. The only measurable value now, after about three years, is the amount of his debt. The education the children receive there is on par, if not worse, with the nearby public school, for which he still pays through the real estate tax. It’s just one example, but I think it works in similar ways in other situations where you hear people talk about “values”.
Values == your money that is no longer yours
My “values” are based mostly on the clear memory of how much it sucked, as a child, to be constantly hungry and cold. Even if all of the worst case scenarios were born out by empirical observation, I still wouldn’t support putting billions of people through those experiences just so the glitterati could save a few thousand miles worth of condo, hotel, and international conglomerate infested coastline.
They never entertain the idea the “values” problem affects them first